


following odysseus's footsteps (when homecoming's the hard part)

by hoosierbitch



Series: Sean's Awesome Plans Are Awesome [2]
Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom, X-Men: First Class - Fandom
Genre: Aftermath, Awkward Conversations, Loneliness, M/M, Multi, Post Beach, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, actual twinkies this time, teenage boys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-21
Updated: 2012-04-21
Packaged: 2017-11-04 02:11:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/388528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hoosierbitch/pseuds/hoosierbitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No one dies, but it still feels like a loss.</p>
            </blockquote>





	following odysseus's footsteps (when homecoming's the hard part)

**Author's Note:**

> This follows [your fingertips across my skin](http://hoosierbitch.livejournal.com/72512.html), but can be read separately (all you really need to know is that Alex and Hank and Sean totally got it on).
> 
> This is the last part in this series.

They don't spend their last night together. Hank makes them do laundry ( _do you want Erik to be the one to find these sheets?_ ) and then disappears. Sean figures he probably went to find Raven and tries not to be hurt. He spends the night curled around Alex, pretending to be asleep to cover up the fact that he just wants to be as close to Alex as he can get. In the morning he makes eggs and bacon for breakfast, only no one eats it because they can't find Hank but they do find a destroyed lab and a box full of suits.

Before they get on the plane he kisses Alex goodbye and tries to get close enough to Hank to do the same. Hank won't let him. New Hank, blue Hank, the Hank who treats them all like dangerous strangers, won’t even look him in the eye. Sean settles for brushing his hand against Hank's fur ( _so soft_ ), thinking about all the other firsts he'd wanted to share. How many more plans he’d already made.

They get in the plane and he buckles his seatbelt and then they go to war.

*

None of them die.

*

They sit on the beach for hours. Charles turns whiter and whiter and Moira screams into an unresponsive radio until she cries. Alex gets up and walks to the place where Raven had been standing when she disappeared, kicking at the marks she left in the dirt. Hank talks to Charles and tries to keep him calm and Sean just…Sean sits. In the sand. Looking out over the water. Admiring the patterns that the boats make as they dance their ways back home.

He’s the one who gets them home, though, in the end. Sean and Alex sit side-by-side and shirtless while Hank pieces together one complete suit from their battered uniforms, swearing at his fingers and the sun and the needle that he drops three times. He’s the only one who knows how to sew though, so Alex and Sean just sit and burn in the sun and watch.

He takes a test flight when Hank declares the suit flight-worthy. Opens his mouth and screams and finds that he really doesn’t want to come back down. The beach gets smaller and smaller in steady spirals and the ships turn into tadpoles and he collects so much condensation from the clouds that it sticks his eyelashes together. That’s a first. Must be the air in the tropics. Maybe the clouds are just denser since they’re filled with ash and strung through with smoke.

He does come back down. And Alex reaches out for him, and Hank ignores him to stare at Charles, and Moira wraps her arms around his shoulders and whispers that she’s ready so he leaves.

He flies for hours. Screams louder and longer and angrier than he’s ever had to before. Screams because he does feel like a siren, sickening and wrong, feels like there’s a twisted song underneath his skin that he needs to get out. He flies until he gets seasick from watching the waves underneath their feet and so he closes his eyes and lets Moira’s confident voice direct his flight. She weighs about the same amount as Alex, he thinks, and by the time he lands on a hospital roof his entire body aches.

“Wait here,” she says, and he opens his mouth to protest but no sound comes out. “Did you lose your voice?” He tries to say _No. No, that can’t happen,_ but all that comes out is a croak. “Is that—is that bad?”

He sits on a corner of the roof and tries to pretend that he’s in Xavier’s castle leaning over a balcony, or in Ireland standing on a cliff, tries to pretend he’s not terrified that Moira and his voice will never return.

 

The sun is rising when he hears the helicopter’s blades. And Moira goes out to meet the helicopter before it even lands, yelling at somebody through a new radio, waving her ID around like a gun. And then Charles is carried out. Strapped to a gurney. He's asleep, which seems strange. Sean hadn’t realized quite how much he’d idolized Xavier before this…this proof of his humanity. _We’re supermen_ , Erik had said. _We’re practically gods_.

Charles doesn’t look like a god. He looks dead.

Erik proved himself wrong.

Alex gets out last, after the medics have hauled Charles away. He’s got a dark blue jacket on that one of the medics must have lent him. It’s not zipped. Alex has a big burn on his chest in the shape of a circle and a sunburn creeping down from his shoulders. Sean presses his back against the cement he’s been leaning against and wraps his hand around his ankle. The ring of bruises that Alex’s hand had drawn there (as he hung on, as Sean carried them) is already black. Alex finds him and explains that Moira had pulled some strings and gotten a boat to come for Hank. Alex finds him and sits down next to him and puts his hand on Sean’s throat when he tries to say _I’m glad you’re okay_ but only a croak comes out.

Alex finds him and they sit on the roof until the sun finishes rising. It’s a new day. Alex wraps his hand around Sean’s ankle too, and Sean wonders if they’ll ever do anything as simple as hold hands again. Without bruises and leather uniforms and this day hovering between them like a lonely ghost.

None of them die but it still feels like a loss.

It is a loss.

*

"I'm not going back to prison," Alex says. Moira’s in surgery with Xavier and Hank’s on his way back home. Sean looks down the hallway but there’s nobody coming for them. There aren't any FBI or CIA agents in the waiting room, no cops. Just one bored security guard at the door reading a newspaper.

"Of course you're not," Sean whispers, sipping at his hot tea. "You just saved, like, the whole _world_."

"And then it tried to kill us," Alex counters. "And when the school gets shut down, all of the strings that Xavier pulled and all of the papers that he signed won't mean squat. I should have gone with Magneto," Alex mutters into his knees, body curled up like a comma on his small plastic chair.

"Darwin," Sean reminds him, because they'd both seen him die.

"That wasn't Erik," Alex mutters. "That was Shaw. _Fuck_." He leans out of his chair a bit to look down the hallway, but there's no doctors or cops coming to tell them what’s going to happen next. “If I'd known that Xavier was hurt this bad, I would have gone with Magneto."

Sean tries not to be hurt. It doesn't work. "Because you believe what he was saying, or because you're afraid of getting sent back to prison?"

When Alex puts his head between his knees all that Sean can see is the tension in his shoulders; Alex's sharp shoulder blades pulling against the fabric of his borrowed scrubs. "I can't go back there," Alex says quietly. "Not after—not after having all of—I just can't," he whispers. He doesn't complain when Sean puts an arm around his shoulder, so he leaves it there. 

*

The mansion's lab is outdated and Hank's degrees in genetics don't qualify him to treat Charles' injuries, so they spend a couple of days in a Florida hospital, waiting until Charles is stable enough to transport back to a hospital New York where Moira’s connections will protect them better.

Alex stays in the mansion with Hank, making sure he doesn't inject himself with any new experimental drugs or jump off a balcony or run away, and Sean sits in the hospital. His voice comes back slowly, just like it had when he had the flu when he was seven. There are a couple of nurses who bring him tea and soup and cough drops and tell him how sweet it is that he’s taking such good care of his cousin. His cousin Charles. He figures they probably know that there’s no blood connecting them, given that they look nothing alike, but he’s seen himself in a mirror. He knows that he looks pathetic and apparently pity’s enough to earn him a couple blind eyes.

They're in New York and Sean has been waiting in the hospital for a week when Xavier recovers enough to dream.

It starts as a sadness. A melancholy note in the air; like a grey drizzly overcast day hanging over their heads. That sensation lasts an entire weekend. On Monday it deepens, and Sean starts to…miss people. Starts to miss his mother, in a way he hasn’t since he was a little boy. On the morning of Charles’ tenth day in New York it becomes a nightmare.

It begins as a pressure on his forehead. He jolts awake because it feels like Alex, Alex or Hank or maybe both of them together, their hands wrapped around the same gun, fingers poised over the same trigger, pressing the barrel against his skull—

But the metal weapon that is threatening him is not a gun and the warm familiar presence standing in front of him is not Alex or Hank. It’s a coin, a coin that’s breaking through his skin, pressing against bone, and he bites his lip to keep from screaming because if he opens his mouth he’ll break every piece of glass in the hospital.

The other people in the waiting room—the old man who’d offered him coffee one time, the nurses who give him updates as often as they can, the young woman who’s been crying in a corner the past two days—they scream. They scream and double over and clutch their heads and Sean thinks _Erik_. It’s Erik who’s hurting them, Erik who’s killing them. Charles who’s reliving it.

He can see Erik’s eyes as he stumbles down the hall, overlaid with Shaw’s blank bleeding face and the inside of the jet and the hospital walls. He stubs his toes and falls and lets out a whimper that cracks the tile beneath his feet. Erik’s face flashes across his mind like a series of portraits in a museum gallery. _Erik_ , by Charles. Laughing and intimate and then angry, close and sweaty and then—and then—

Charles dreams, and everyone in the hospital finds out what it is like to be in the mind of a man who's being murdered.

By the time he reaches Charles’ room, the coin ( _too warm, too wide to be a bullet, a coin that he hates for a reason he doesn’t remember_ ) has passed through the back of his skull. He’s grateful Moira’s back in Washington for the weekend, grateful that Alex is at the mansion watching after Hank. Because Sean is dying. His body still obeys his commands, and when he touches his forehead it’s smooth and unblemished, but when he get to the side of Charles’ bed he can feel the coin break through the back of his skull.

He dies and Erik leaves and Charles wakes up. Sean barely remembers picking up the glass of water but Charles’ face is wet. The scene on the beach that Sean hadn’t been a part of but will never be able to forget jumps to a startled conclusion ( _Erik, no—_ ) and then shuts off. And for the first time, Sean hates Erik.

Because Sean doesn't know how to hold Charles.

Charles dripping wet from the ice water Sean threw at him and he’s _crying_ and he looks like he wants to run away but they both know he’s only been able to move his arms for a couple of days and his legs maybe never again. Sean hates Erik and wishes he was there because Erik would know what to do.

Charles had been Sean’s savior, his mentor, his teacher. Older and smarter and wiser. And now he’s broken. The only people who had been on the same level as Charles—intellectually, socially, emotionally—are gone. The uneven tripod that had held Charles together has shattered, and Sean knows with a fragile certainty how it mirrors the architecture of his own life.

He sits on the edge of Charles’ bed and tells the nurse to call Moira. The waves of _oh, god, Erik Erik why_ threaten to overwhelm him when he touches Charles’ skin but he doesn’t let go of his limp hand.

 _Pain shared is pain halved_ , he tells himself, holding on.

He spends the night crying from Xavier's pain and wishing that he'd said _no_ when Erik painted his picture of a future where they were all equal and protected and wanted. He wants to know how Xavier could have been blind enough to fall for the same lies Sean had been so desperate to believe in. 

*

The next morning Moira has the mansion stocked with everything Xavier could need and Hank finishes his course in paraplegic home care and Sean's still touching the back of his head periodically to check for the exit wound of a coin that never touched him.

Moira drives the ambulance up to the mansion and Hank rolls Xavier's stretcher to the room he cleared out on the first floor and Alex comes outside to hold Sean. Doesn't matter that Moira's staring and that they've never actually hugged before and it's really fucking queer. He can feel Alex's ribs when he wraps his arms around Sean's chest. Can feel Alex's breath against his shoulder.

"You're so young," Moira whispers. Alex pulls back from Sean and he glares at her. Sean can't tell if his eyes are just red-rimmed or glowing with power. Either way, he looks like a threat.

"We can't afford to be young anymore," Sean says, putting himself between them. "We're fighting a war. Soldiers don't get to be children." It feels wrong to parrot Erik's words at her, but in the end, Erik been right. He'd believed in a war. And he'd gotten it.

Alex holds his hand and instead of feeling like a friend or a fuckbuddy he feels like a brother-in-arms.

*

"Hank's been in there forever," Alex says days later, leaning against the doorframe of Xavier’s new room. "I know it's still touch-and-go, but there's no reason for him to be in there _all the time_ , right?"

"You think he's avoiding us?"

Sean asks.

"He's blue," Alex says flatly. "He felt like a freak when all he had to do was wear big shoes, how do you think he feels now?"

"I bet he feels great," Sean says, because he feels like being an asshole. "Like a freak," he says with a sigh, when Alex just keeps staring at the crack underneath the door, waiting for a glimpse of Hank's shadow. He leaves Alex there and walks away.

*

The thing is. The thing is, is he’s a killer now.

He’s been a lot of things. Mostly, he knows he’s a fag and a mutant, and that had been a lot, that had been too much, those labels had covered so much of him there hadn’t been much room left. Where’s he gonna fit killer, he wonders, looking at his freckled skin in the bathroom mirror.

He does feel different. Especially his voice, which had come back strange and unfamiliar. The place it comes from feels like a whirlpool now instead of a well, feels turbulent instead of deep.

He wonders maybe if this is just what growing up feels like.

Somehow there is still sand in his hair. He’d taken a couple of hasty showers in Xavier’s hospital room, enough so he wouldn’t smell bad enough to scare off the cute nurses, but not enough to scrub the remnants of that day away. There’s sand in his hair and a bruise around his ankle in the shape of Alex’s hand and he thinks maybe it would be best if no one ever touched him again.

Fag and mutant are who he is. Killer—that’s something he did. Something he tried to do, anyway, when he’d been screaming at Angel and scaring off fucking _warships_ , trying to rescue Alex because in the heat of battle Alex’s life had been more important than everyone else’s.

He’d never really been in a fight before. Just the CIA attack and then the beach, so he’s racking up experience fast. Maybe this is just how it works.

He’s seen a lot of dead people over the past three weeks. Darwin, agents who had been on his side but who had been mean to him, soldiers he'd never met who wanted to kill him, Shaw who he’d never spoken to but whose death he’d felt so intimately his skull still aches sometimes. It had been Angel who Sean had wanted to kill. Angel who he’d had a crush on, Angel who had teased him and made fun of him and thanked him when he’d brought her a coke with lots of ice. He’d flirted with her, and she’d let him. She spit fire at him, and he screamed solid waves of sound at her.

The voice that Charles had called a gift is really a weapon.

He understands that now.

He just—just doesn’t get how it happened. He doesn’t look different. He’s got more freckles, maybe, and he’s definitely a bit skinnier. There are dark circles around his eyes. He forces himself into the bath because if he’s gone too long Alex will worry ( _Alex worries a lot, twitching at strange noises and constantly looking out the windows at the driveway, waiting for someone to come and take him away_ ).

He sinks under the water and watches the bubbles of his breath burst on the surface.

*

The whiskey’s nice. Moira had stocked up the kitchen with healthy food and made sure all the bills were getting paid and then she’d left for the weekend. Sean doesn’t know what they’d do without her.

Probably drink a lot more of the whiskey they'd found in a locked cabinet in Charles’ office. Sean’s had enough tonight that he feels kind of sick, his stomach aching in seasick distant waves, but Alex is kissing him, so it evens out. Alex tastes like whiskey. The smooth part of it, the mature tease of dark liquid hiding in the corners of his lips and the depths of his mouth.

“Hank should be here,” Sean says, holding onto Alex’s hips and concentrating on keeping the whirlpool inside of him calm. He wonders if Charles has lessons in control that cover this kind of thing. Drinking away pain and fucking away problems. He probably does.

“Oh. We can—we can stop, until he comes back. If he—when he comes back, if he still wants to, we can wait for then. That’s fine. That makes sense.”

He tugs Alex’s arms and pulls him back into his lap, crouched a bit awkwardly between his bent knees. Holds him until he wiggles into a seated position and then still doesn’t let go because Sean’s too tired to be cool and too lonely to want anything but this. “Shut up. I’m just saying…it’s wrong for Hank not to be here. Hank should be here,” he whispers, and the aches in his body that he’s been ignoring build up and he wants to scream, wants to moan, wants to bite his way into Alex’s body and see if there’s a bonfire burning there, he wonders what Alex’s flame uses for fuel.

Alex shivers in his arms and then curls up against the curve of Sean’s body. “Yeah,” he says quietly. “He should be.”

*

After the war, after the cure that doesn’t work, Hank finds new places to hide. He stops using Xavier as a shield once he gets the wheelchair and starts leaving the mansion with Moira for a few hours every day. Hank can't retreat to the plane because it's still on a beach smoldering somewhere, the lab's still destroyed, and he hasn't slept in their shared room since before the—before. They'd only spent four nights there all together but the bed still feels empty without him.

Sean finally stumbles across him on the roof. Close to Sean’s own favorite balcony, only Hank's hanging sideways off a nearby chimney just holding on with one giant foot. And staring at the ground, which Sean knows is too far away for even Hank to jump to safely.

Sean retreats inside as quietly as possible and fetches Alex and their supplies. They sit in the room by the biggest open window and watch the sunset, waiting for Hank.

Hank looks terrifying when he finally comes inside. Poised on the windowsill like a gargoyle, framed by a brilliant red glow that turns the halo of his hair a deep purple.

"We have alcohol and twinkies," Sean says quickly, holding out a bag like a peace offering.

"And some clothes," Alex adds. "In case you want to change out of your uniform?" The salesmen at the clothing store had looked at them pretty funny—two slim guys picking out the biggest clothes they had, probably big enough for both of them to squeeze into together—but they'd still left with a couple of bags full of slacks and sweats and pajamas.

"Please don't go," he asks, when Hank starts to back out of the room. "Please."

He hasn't seen Hank close up since they'd been on the beach, and most of that had been a blur. He's taller now. Taller and broader and more muscular. His hands are huge, he notices, heat curling in his gut as Hank delicately lifts the bag of food from his hands with new blunt fingers.

Sean sighs with relief when Hank sits himself down on the couch. Perched on it, almost. Sean takes the window seat and Alex sits close to the door. Blocking Hank’s exits. And kind of obviously, given the way that Hank glares at them before pulling a big yellow hoodie from the bag. “We figured—Alex thought you liked yellow.”

“Thanks,” Hank says, and Sean rolls his eyes when Alex blushes.

“So, what’ve you been up to?”

Hank struggles to get into the sweatshirt, pulling it on over the tattered remains of his suit. “Taking care of Charles. What do you think I’ve been doing?”

“Avoiding us,” Alex says simply.

Hank’s pulled out some snacks but he just holds them. His fingers are about as big as the fucking twinkies, Sean realizes, and his brain unhelpfully supplies some ideas about what those fingers would feel like up his ass; he wonders what other body parts changed too.

"I should have gone with Raven," Hank says. Alex looks at the floor and nods and Sean doesn’t know if he’s agreeing that Hank should leave or saying that he still wants to leave too, and it doesn’t matter because Sean is fucking _done_. They wouldn't be falling apart if Alex and Hank would just help him hold them all together.

"You both want to leave so goddamn bad?” He’s out of his chair before he realizes he’s moving. “Then _go_. Just buy a big magnet and follow the pull until you get there. Hey, maybe Riptide and Azazel can show you all those fun tricks they used on the CIA--and Angel can tell you some fun stories about how she tried to kill me, that'd be a lot of fun. Maybe—maybe you can ask Erik why he left Charles bleeding to death on a beach, huh? While you're there? You can write me letters, tell me about all the fun you're having—"

"Sean—"

"Shut the fuck up, Hank. Yes, you're blue. Newsflash: you're a _mutant_. Big whoop. You're blue, you've got big feet, deal with it. You know what _else_ you have?" Hank is glaring at him and he knows he's being an asshole; he can't seem to help it. He feels like a dam, the way his power and anger are building up inside of him like a flood. Feels like a dam about to break. "You've got _me_ , you giant emotionally constipated furball." And he's being crude and petty and reckless, and he's yelling loud enough that the walls are shaking, and he doesn't _care_ because he's angry and lonely and—and tired. Tired of watching Alex jump at shadows, the fear of prison on the horizon keeping him constantly on edge. "Us," he corrects himself, because Alex has trouble sleeping without Hank there, too. "You have us."

"And we're all we've got, now," Alex whispers. Sean hates hearing his own words echoed out of Alex's mouth, but they sound like—from Alex, it sounds like the beginning of a battle cry instead of failure.

"Do you even—how can you still _want_ me?" Hank asks, his toes reflexively curling away from them.

Sean’s still fighting down his anger, so it’s Alex who answers. Only he doesn’t say anything. Just walks over to the couch and runs his hands through the hair on the back of Hank’s hands, up the swell of muscle on his forearms, over the sweatshirt to the smooth fur of his neck.

Sean still feels a scream building up inside of him, still feels like he’s about to break himself or maybe everything around him, and when Hank touches him, finally, for the first time in weeks, he feels like he’s going to shatter.

“You’ve got to make Alex a new suit,” he says, as Hank rests his huge hand over Sean’s own. “So that he can fight back if the cops come for him.” Hank nods, and Alex— glaring at Sean for ratting him out—relaxes a little bit. “And you’ve got to let us help take care of Charles, because you can’t do it all by yourself. And you—"

“Shut up,” Hank says, taking a deep breath before letting it out in a sigh. "I'm not going anywhere. None of us are." He's got one hand covering Sean's and the other's wrapped around the back of Alex's neck, pulling them all together. Sean opens his mouth to argue but all of the anger and power and loneliness that had been building to a crescendo inside of him are...gone. The scream that he’s been fighting to control has faded.

He feels quiet.

For the first time since they stopped the war from starting he thinks maybe...maybe they won. 

*

Feedback is appreciated. Thank you for reading!

 


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